Last week, there was something of a kerfuffle over the proposal from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to impose new regulations on voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs. Fordham called for requiring all participating students to take state assessments; mandating public disclosure of those results, school by school, except for schools that enroll fewer than ten total students in tested grades; and requiring schools that enroll a substantial number of students to have their eligibility determined by how their students perform on state tests.

Districts like Mooresville, North Carolina, and Danville, Kentucky, have rethought instruction, the teaching job, and classroom culture, and used technology to turbocharge those changes. These districts and networks have clear goals and engaged teachers. Indeed, their teacher satisfaction figures are terrific, as is student attendance and interest. Mooresville has the second-lowest spending among 115 North Carolina school districts and was recently named the best school district in America by Scholastic.

Since the Common Core standards were unveiled in 2010, advocates have insisted that it is a "state-led" effort. President Obama declared in the 2011 State of the Union, "These standards were developed... not by Washington, but by Republican and Democratic governors throughout the country." In truth, there is a studied dishonesty about the "state-led" rhetoric.

I like our earnest Secretary of Education. I think he means well. That said, I've had serious reservations about the way he has approached his office, including his approach to Race to the Top, NCLB waivers, and the Common Core. Secretary Duncan has unapologetically and aggressively extended the federal role in education.

Yesterday, we unveiled the 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence rankings. From years past, though, we've learned that a lot of readers are curious as to how scholars fared when it came to particular fields or disciplines. After all, education researchers work in a wide variety of fields. Today, we will report out the top ten finishers for five disciplinary categories, as well as the top ten ranked junior faculties.

Today, we unveil the 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence rankings. The metrics, as explained yesterday, recognize university-based scholars in the U.S. who are contributing most substantially to public debates about education. The rankings offer a useful, if imperfect, gauge of the public influence edu-scholars had in 2013. The rubric reflects both a scholar's body of academic work--encompassing the breadth and influence of their scholarship--and their footprint on the public discourse last year.

Tomorrow, I'll be unveiling the 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence rankings, honoring and ranking the 200 university-based education scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation's education discourse last year. Today, I want to run through the scoring rubric for those rankings. The Edu-Scholar rankings employ metrics that are publicly available, readily comparable, and replicable by third parties.

On Wednesday in this space, I'll be publishing the 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, honoring and ranking the 200 education scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation's education discourse last year. Today, I want to take a few moments to explain the purpose of those ratings (tomorrow we'll review the scoring rubric).

Just a head's up, next week we'll be running the 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. We'll be honoring and ranking the 200 edu-scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation's education discourse last year. The exercise is designed to balance the academy's unfortunate tendency to discount scholars that make real, relevant contributions to vital public policy debates.

In the hope that we might work towards a more fruitful and less vicious discussion of education policy in 2014 than we suffered through this past year, here are eight resolutions we might all do well to heed: